Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News » Blackburn Rovers. The source of much of the evil that inflicts football today
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Blackburn Rovers will forever be known in football as the inventors of that most pernicious evil, Rotational Fouling. They later adopted the Rotational Timewasting approach that Bolton Wanderers developed soon after, and worked with other clubs to combine this philosophy with the “park the team bus in front of the goal” vision of Sam “The Slug” Allerdyce to give us Zero Football. That is their contribution to football.
But to leave it at that would be amiss of me, for Blackburn R also gave us the first version of “Buy the Championship” which Chelsea have so clearly followed in recent years.
Among Blackburn people (I use the latter word lightly) it is known as “The Jack Walker revolution,” and in my humble opinion, it is worthy of study, not just because of our game against the knuckle on the floor beasts from the north on bank holiday Monday but because Blackburn have made such a significant contribution to all that is wrong in football today.
Jack Walker took over the show as Blackburn R came 19th in Division II in 1990/1 and immediately started splashing millions of pounds on players. Dalglish had resigned as Liverpool manager (having cited the stress of football management) just a few months previously, and so came back and started spending.
Despite being way ahead in the league, the club lost six games in a row, and had to scramble around in the play offs and they scraped through in the final with a penalty to get into the top league. And that was when the first notion that maybe money was not enough.
But they continued spending, tweaking the transfer record bringing in Shearer (whose first ever game in the league I saw, when he played for Southampton against Arsenal at the Dell – and we lost 4-2). And they went on buying and finished fourth in the league. A few years on they had won the league. Money had worked – you could buy the league. From the bottom of the second division to winning the league in five years. Whatever it takes.
But within four years they were back to their spiritual home – the second division, having idiotically sacked R Hodgson as manager. Their desperation was summed up by the appointment of Graeme Souness as manager – a manager so inept he once… oh well, you know.
Jack Walker died just after the start of the 2000/1, and left a bequest to the club – an interesting sum, but not enough to regain their former glory. Even with him pumping millions in, they were not able to match Liverpool and Manchester United, whose trip to financial suicide was now starting.
By the start of 2003/4 they were selling with Duff, Berg and Dunn all going. Souness went, and they turned to Mark Hughes who saw exactly where the land lay, and he combined the pickings of the benefactors money with rotational fouling which he started to develop.
Hughes is, beyond any doubt, one of the prime enemies of football, and in a dreadful and disgraceful FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal, we saw his evil creation in all its horror and gory detail. We also saw the effect the Oooooze revolution was having on the locals who were now bored out of their minds but the Oozian football. The Millennium stadium stood before our eyes with huge banks of seating at the Blackburn side unsold. Complaints to the FA that there were 15,000 Arsenal fans who could have taken those seats, were met with no reply, and we saw clearly the sheer utter awfulness of what had happened.
Arsenal won, but Ooze saw the system worked and the Oooooze got the club into the Diddly Euro Cup.
Hughes refined his evil creation and now it took on a form of its own as he refined rotational fouling into a black art. Signings using the benefactor cash were given the new task – and the crowds that had already shown their contempt of the development, moved away from the club, as the upper tier of one stand was regularly left empty for games.
In May 2008, the evil Hughes left Blackburn Rovers for Manchester City and in came P Ince. When Ince was proven to be the ghastly nonentity who likes to be called “The Guvnr” there could only be one person to replace him, the man who had developed rotational time-wasting: Sam “the slug” Allardyce.
The evils amalgamated and we have Zero Football.
The club is now up for sale. Several consortia have had a look, but usually one look is all is needed. This evil parody of football is not what is wanted.
Footnote: the name of the town first appears as Blacheborne in the Domesday Book in 1086. The origin of the name is the Old English word for bleach.
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Arsenal Reserves to play the Slugs’ XI
The Fabulous Fabianski Twins
Sagna, Silvestre, Campbell, Clichy (Eboue)
Song (Eastmond)
Rosicky, Diaby (Marida)
Nasri, Van Persie, Bendtner (Theo, Vela)
It is said that Arshavin, Cesc, Almunia, Denilson, Djourou, Gibbs, Gallas, Vermaelen, Ramsey are injured – so just the usual nine players out.
The result…
- Serious bruising to ankles and shins – Blackburn win 9-0
- Gum chewing slug like creature: Blackburn win 1-0
- Fouls: Blackburn win 18-5
- Yellow cards: Arsenal win 4-0 (ref bent)
- Half empty ground: Blackburn win hands down
- Dire and boring back passing: Blackburn 10 Arsenal 0
- The score: Blackburn 1 Arsenal 4
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